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ADDRESS 



OF 



PRESIDENT WILSON 



OPENING THE CAMPAIGN IN NEW YORK 

FOR THE 

SECOND RED CROSS FUND 



SATURDAY, MAY 18, 1918 




/^-IL^U^) 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1918 



k). or i). 

JUN I 1118 



,\V^ 



ADDRESS. 



Mr. Chaieman and fellow countrtmen : I should be very sorry 
to think that Mr. Davison in any degree curtailed his exceedingly 
interesting speech for fear that he was postponing mine, because I 
am sure you listened with the same intent and intimate interest 
with which I listened to the extraordinarily vivid account he gave 
of the things which he had realized because he had come in contact 
with them on the other side of the water. We compassed them 
with our imagination. He compassed them in his personal experi- 
ence. 

I am not come here to-night to review for you the work of the 
Red Cross. I am not competent to do so, because I have not had 
the time or the opportunity to follow it in detail. I have come 
here simply to say a few words to you as to what it all seems to 
me to mean. 

It means a great deal. There are two duties with which we are 
face to face. The first duty is to win the war. The second duty, 
that goes hand in hand with it, is to win it greatly and worthily, 
showing the real quality of our power not only, but the real quality 
of our purpose and of ourselves. Of course, the first duty, the duty 
that we must keep in the foreground of our thought until it is 
accomplished, is to win the war. I have heard gentlemen recently 
say that we must get five million men ready. Why limit it to five 
million? I have asked the Congress of the United States to name 
no limit, because the Congress intends, I am sure, as we all intend, 
that every ship that can carry men or supplies shall go laden upon 
every voyage with every man and every supply she can carry. 

And we are not to be diverted from the grim purpose of winning 
the war by any insincere approaches upon the subject of peace. I 
can say with a clear conscience that I have tested those intimations 
and have found them insincere. I now recognize them for what they 
are, an opportunity to have a free hand, particularly in the East, to 
carry out purposes of conquest and exploitation. Every proposal 
with regard to accommodation in the West involves a reservation 
with regard to the East. Now, so far as I am concerned, I intend to 
stand by Russia as well as France. The helpless and the friendless 

61055—18 (3) 



are the Aery ones that need friends and succor, and if any man in 
Germany thinks we are going to sacrifice anybody for our own sake, 
I tell them now they are mistaken. For the "glory of this Avar, my 
felloAA'-citizens, so fur as aa'c are concerned, is that it is, perhaps for 
the first time in history, an unselfish Avar. I could not be proud to 
fight for a selfish purpose, but I can be proud to fight for mankind. 
If thcA^ Avish peace, let them come forAvnrd through accredited rep- 
resentatiA^es and lay their terms on the table. We have laid ours, 
and they know Avhat they are. 

But behind all this grim purpose, my friends, lies the opportunity 
to demonstrate not only force, Avhich will be demonstrated to the 
utmost, but the opportunity to demonstrate character, and it is that 
opportunity' that we have most conspicuously in the Avork of the 
Eed Cross. Not that our men in arms do not represent our character, 
^ for they do, and it is a character Avhich those who see and realize 
\ appreciate and admire, but their duty is the duty of force. The duty 
of the Red Cross is the duty of mercy and succor and friendship. 
Have you formed a picture in your imagination of what this Avar 
is doing for us and for the Avorld;? In my own mind I am convinced 
that not a hundred years of peace could have knitted this Nation 
together as this single year of Avar has knitted it together; and better 
even than that, if possible, it is knitting the Avorld together. Look 
at the picture ! In the center of the scene, four nations engaged against 
the world, and at every point of vantage. shoAving that they are seek- 
ing selfish aggrandizement: and against them, twenty-three gOA'ern- 
ments, representing the greater part of the population of the world, 
drawn together into a new sense of community of interest, a new 
sense of community of purpose, a ucav sense of unitj^ of life. The 
Secretary of War told me an interesting incident the other day. He 
said when he Avas in Italy a member of the Italian Government was 
explaining to him the many reasons Avhy Italy felt near to the 
United States. He said, " If you want to try an interesting experi- 
ment, go up to any one of these troop trains and ask in English how 
many of them have been in America, and see what happens." He 
tried the experiment. He went up to a troop train and he asked, 
" How many of you boys have been in America," and he said it 
seemed to him as if half of them sprang up : " Me from San Fran- 
cisco," "Me from New York,"— all over. There Avas part of the 
heart of America in the Italian Army, — people that had been knitted 
to us by association, who Imew us, who had lived amongst us. who 
had worked shoulder to shoulder with us, and now, friends of Amer- 
ica, were fighting for their native Italy. 

Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world to- 
gether. And this intimate contact of the great Red Cross with the 
peoples who are suffering the terrors and deprivations of this war 



is going to be one of the greatest instrumentalities of friendship that 
the world ever knew ; and the center of the heart of it all, if we sus- 
tain it properly, will be this land that we so dearly love. 

My friends, a great day of duty has come, and duty finds a man's 
soul as no kind of work can ever find it. May I say this : The duty 
that faces us all now is to serve one another. No man can afford to 
make a fortune out of this war. There are men amongst us who 
have forgotten that, if they ever saw it. Some of you are old 
enough — I am old enough — to remember men who made fortunes 
out of the Civil War, and you know how they were regarded by 
their fellow citizens. That was a war to save one country. This is 
a war to save the world. And your relation to the Red Cross is one 
of the relations which will relieve you of the stigma. You cannot 
give anything to the Government of the United States. It will not 
accept it. There is a law of Congress against accepting even services 
without pay. The only thing that the Government will accept is a 
loan and duties performed, but it is a great deal better to give than 
to lend or to pay, and your great channel for giving is the American 
Red Cross. Down in your hearts you can not take very much satis- 
faction in the last analysis in lending money to the Government of 
the United States, because the interest which you draw will burn 
your pockets. It is a commercial transaction; and some men have 
even dared to cavil at the rate of interest, not knowing the incidental 
commentary that that constitutes upon their attitude. 

But when you give, something of your heart, something of your 
soul, something of yourself goes with the gift, particularly when it 
is given in such form that it never can come back by way of direct 
benefit to yourself. You know there is the old cynical definition of 
gratitude, as " the lively expectation of favors to come." Well, there 
is no expectation of favors to come in this kind of giving. These 
things are bestowed in order that the world may be a fitter place to 
live in, that men may be succored, that homes may be restored, that 
suffering may be relieved, that the face of the earth may have the 
blight of destruction removed from it, and that wherever force goes, 
there shall go mercy and helpfulness. 

And when you give, give absolutely all that you can spare, and do 
not consider yourself liberal in the giving. If you give with self- 
adulation, you are not giving at all, you are giving to your own 
Vanity, but if you give until it hurts, then your heart-blood goes 
into it. 

Think what we have here! We call it the American Red Cross, 
but it is merely a branch of a great international organization which 
is not only recognized by the statutes of each of the civilized govern- 
ments of the world, but is recognized by international agreement 
and treaty, as the recognized and accepted instrumentality of mercy 



and succor. And one of the deepest stains that rest upon the reputa- 
tion of the German Army is that they have not respected the Red 
Cross. That goes to the root of the matter. They have not respected 
the instrumentality they themselves participated in setting up as the 
thing Avhich no man was to touch because it was the expression of 
common humanity. 'By being members of the American Red Cross, 
we are members of a great fraternity and comradeship which extends 
all over the world. This cross which these ladies bore to-day is an 
emblem of Christianity itself. 

It tills my imagination, ladies and gontlcMuen, to think of the 
women all over this countrj^ who arc busy to-night, and are busy 
every niglit and ever}'' day, doing the work of the Red Cross, busy 
with a great eagerness to find out the most serviceable thing to do, 
busy with a forgetfulness of all the old frivolities of their social 
relationships, ready to curtail the duties of the household in order 
that they may contribute to this common work that all their hearts 
are engaged in and in doing which their hearts become acquainted 
with each other. When you think of this, you realize how the 
people of the United States are being drawn together into a great 
intimate family whose heart is being used for the service of the 
soldiers not only, but for the service of civilians where they suffer 
and are lost in a maze of distresses and distractions. 

You have, then, this noble picture of justice and mercy as the two 
servants of liberty. For only where men are free do they think the 
thoughts of comradeship, only where they are free do they think the 
thoughts of sj'mpath}', only where they are free are they mutually 
helpful, only where they are free do they realize their dependence 
upon one another and their conu'adeship in a conunon interest and 
common necessity. If you ladies and gentlemen could read some of 
the touching despatches which come through official channels, for 
even through those channels there come voices of humanity that are 
infinitely pathetic ; if you could catch some of those voices that speak 
the utter longing of oppressed and helpless peoples all over the world 
to hear something like the Battle Hymn of the Republic, to hear the 
feet of the great hosts of Liberty coming to set them free, to set their 
minds free, set their lives free, set their children free; you would 
know what comes into the heart of those who are trying to contribute 
all the brains and power they have to this great enterprise of Liberty. 
I summon you to the comradeship. I summon you in this next week 
to say how much and how sincerely and how unanimously j^ou sus- 
tain the heart of the world. 

o 



LIBRfiRY OF congress''' 



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